Situating COVID in a Local Context

Presentation Location

VSU University Center, Magnolia Room 2

Document Type

Event

Start Date

11-3-2023 8:30 AM

End Date

11-3-2023 10:00 AM

Description

Situating COVID in a Local Context (Marjorie M. Snipes, Session Chair)

  • Ashley McGraw. (University of South Carolina) COVID-19 Oral Histories as News Stories of Appalachia.
    Oral historians have often felt obligated to collect stories during disasters and crises, to preserve recollections of experiences and trauma of those affected. During the onset of COVID-19 in the United States, this surge was certainly present. Appalachia, although its boundaries are contested, has a strong association with oral histories, and thus was the focus of one project in particular: a collaboration with the Blue Ridge Public Radio and the Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Museum to collect, curate, publish, and broadcast oral histories of "local" individuals. But, what does it mean to be local, in a region as broad as Appalachia? What content, or rather whose stories, make a good news story or a magazine story? How are stories altered to fit this frame of representing Appalachia? This paper discusses how stories traveled, from storytellers to the archives of Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Museum in Mountain City, Georgia, and were transformed into publishable and circulatable digital and printed news stories. Using discussions of entextualization, re-contextualization, and remediation, I aim to analyze these transcripts to answer these questions of story-making and identity (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bauman 2016).
  • Kiley E. Molinari. (Francis Marion University) A Pandemic Picture: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring Student Engagement in the Pee Dee Region of South Carolina.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the lives of nearly every segment of our world, but the impact on students will most likely not be known for years. For this interdisciplinary project, we are analyzing the impact of COVID-19 on K-12 students. More specifically, how has COVID-19 affected students who may be entering colleges in South Carolina and the Pee Dee region particularly? Among other topics, this project will explore aspects of how students were supported inside and outside of school by faculty, staff, and other district representatives, how students’ behavior might have changed during the pandemic, and how teachers, as well as standardized tests, interpreted student’s learning outcomes/losses pre-pandemic until now. Our study involves a mixed method approach that addresses our definition of engagement. We define student engagement in terms of both (a) district-level outcomes (e.g., reading skills, mathematics skills, behavioral records) and (b) classroom-level outcomes (e.g., attendance, completion of academic activities, etc). Examining what these topics looked like before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic is part of an ongoing research project to understand what this might suggest for incoming college students.
  • Shyra LaGarde. (Valdosta State University) Topological Data Analysis Of SARS-COV-2 Variant Surges Over the Top 50 Most Populated Countries Based on Their Stringency of Policies.
    Over the Top 50 Most Populated Countries Based on Their Stringency of Policies. This research explores an innovative approach for recognizing indicators of policy change employed to counter surges of Covid-19 variants across the 50 most populous countries, which represent various geographical regions. The study encompasses all continents affected by the coronavirus and examines the correlation between variant surges and policy modifications. Our qualitative investigation employs Topological Data Analysis and Persistent Homology to detect salient topological structures such as 1-cycles in the data and use them to infer the effects of policy shifts. We use topological data analysis (TDA) algorithms to analyze the dataset and capture homological details using the R statistical computing environment to extract the topological insights. Our preliminary results have yielded a collection of scatterplots that displays the correlation between new Covid-19 cases and deaths. The plots provide a visual representation of the topological features, which vary across different countries and within countries during further variant surges. Additionally, the scatterplots have an accompanying persistent diagram that displays significant topological features in the datasets of each country, which may be related to policy changes.
  • Marjorie M. Snipes. (University of West Georgia) Ritual in Transition: Supple v. Brittle Ritual Facing Change
    During the pandemic period, social institutions encountered multiple types of stress in adapting to immediate need. Religious institutions faced stress from the disruption of services, meetings, and informal gatherings. This ethnographic research, focused on mainline Christian churches in Carroll County, GA, examines ways that the experience of shutdown and social isolation affected various Christian churches and denominations differently, focusing specifically on the challenges within the practice of ritual. As congregations became displaced and re-shaped, the experience of unity and common vision (communitas) underwent rapid culture change. Preliminary conclusions from this research indicate some common challenges that social groups face when communitas is disrupted, including migration and socio-emotional distress, but a variability in the adaptation of rituals that led to very different outcomes.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Mar 11th, 8:30 AM Mar 11th, 10:00 AM

Situating COVID in a Local Context

VSU University Center, Magnolia Room 2

Situating COVID in a Local Context (Marjorie M. Snipes, Session Chair)

  • Ashley McGraw. (University of South Carolina) COVID-19 Oral Histories as News Stories of Appalachia.
    Oral historians have often felt obligated to collect stories during disasters and crises, to preserve recollections of experiences and trauma of those affected. During the onset of COVID-19 in the United States, this surge was certainly present. Appalachia, although its boundaries are contested, has a strong association with oral histories, and thus was the focus of one project in particular: a collaboration with the Blue Ridge Public Radio and the Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Museum to collect, curate, publish, and broadcast oral histories of "local" individuals. But, what does it mean to be local, in a region as broad as Appalachia? What content, or rather whose stories, make a good news story or a magazine story? How are stories altered to fit this frame of representing Appalachia? This paper discusses how stories traveled, from storytellers to the archives of Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Museum in Mountain City, Georgia, and were transformed into publishable and circulatable digital and printed news stories. Using discussions of entextualization, re-contextualization, and remediation, I aim to analyze these transcripts to answer these questions of story-making and identity (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bauman 2016).
  • Kiley E. Molinari. (Francis Marion University) A Pandemic Picture: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring Student Engagement in the Pee Dee Region of South Carolina.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the lives of nearly every segment of our world, but the impact on students will most likely not be known for years. For this interdisciplinary project, we are analyzing the impact of COVID-19 on K-12 students. More specifically, how has COVID-19 affected students who may be entering colleges in South Carolina and the Pee Dee region particularly? Among other topics, this project will explore aspects of how students were supported inside and outside of school by faculty, staff, and other district representatives, how students’ behavior might have changed during the pandemic, and how teachers, as well as standardized tests, interpreted student’s learning outcomes/losses pre-pandemic until now. Our study involves a mixed method approach that addresses our definition of engagement. We define student engagement in terms of both (a) district-level outcomes (e.g., reading skills, mathematics skills, behavioral records) and (b) classroom-level outcomes (e.g., attendance, completion of academic activities, etc). Examining what these topics looked like before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic is part of an ongoing research project to understand what this might suggest for incoming college students.
  • Shyra LaGarde. (Valdosta State University) Topological Data Analysis Of SARS-COV-2 Variant Surges Over the Top 50 Most Populated Countries Based on Their Stringency of Policies.
    Over the Top 50 Most Populated Countries Based on Their Stringency of Policies. This research explores an innovative approach for recognizing indicators of policy change employed to counter surges of Covid-19 variants across the 50 most populous countries, which represent various geographical regions. The study encompasses all continents affected by the coronavirus and examines the correlation between variant surges and policy modifications. Our qualitative investigation employs Topological Data Analysis and Persistent Homology to detect salient topological structures such as 1-cycles in the data and use them to infer the effects of policy shifts. We use topological data analysis (TDA) algorithms to analyze the dataset and capture homological details using the R statistical computing environment to extract the topological insights. Our preliminary results have yielded a collection of scatterplots that displays the correlation between new Covid-19 cases and deaths. The plots provide a visual representation of the topological features, which vary across different countries and within countries during further variant surges. Additionally, the scatterplots have an accompanying persistent diagram that displays significant topological features in the datasets of each country, which may be related to policy changes.
  • Marjorie M. Snipes. (University of West Georgia) Ritual in Transition: Supple v. Brittle Ritual Facing Change
    During the pandemic period, social institutions encountered multiple types of stress in adapting to immediate need. Religious institutions faced stress from the disruption of services, meetings, and informal gatherings. This ethnographic research, focused on mainline Christian churches in Carroll County, GA, examines ways that the experience of shutdown and social isolation affected various Christian churches and denominations differently, focusing specifically on the challenges within the practice of ritual. As congregations became displaced and re-shaped, the experience of unity and common vision (communitas) underwent rapid culture change. Preliminary conclusions from this research indicate some common challenges that social groups face when communitas is disrupted, including migration and socio-emotional distress, but a variability in the adaptation of rituals that led to very different outcomes.